Long time, no blog

I realized June 30th, 2017 was the last time I made a blog entry here. While probably not an excuse that can cover the entire range of time, I can honestly say there's a good reason for a good percentage of it.

The day after my last blog post, my family and I had one of the worst days of our lives. In a nutshell, our house got flooded, causing $10K+ in damages. Everything that had been stored in the basement had been completely destroyed due to water and muck. This included important stuff, like:

Hot water heater - We literally just got it replaced on January 13, 2018. My friend and I managed to install it in freezing temperatures over the course of four trips to the hardware store and several hours. But for the first time since July 1st of last year, we didn't have to depend on taking showers at the YMCA or a friend's house.

Furnace - We live in the Syracuse, NY area. It gets cold up here. We have no furnace. Instead, we have four electric heaters and a portable kerosene heater. Yeah, large sections of our house are currently unheated. Yeah, there's ice on the inside of the windows in those areas. Yeah, it sucks. But thankfully, where we spend +95% of our time (i.e. my office, the living room, kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom) gets sufficiently heated so we don't freeze. It's not always toasty, but it's livable. Replacement cost: $5,100. That's assuming I do the ductwork since I used to do it for a living. If they did it, would probably add another $2k-$4k.

Circuit breaker panel - Yeah, this sucked as well. We were able to get this replace relatively quickly (less than three weeks time). The downside was, it cost over $2K to get said work done.

Water - We live in the country. We have/use a well. We didn't have running water for nearly a month. Thankfully, I was able to fix it myself, saving us something north of $500+ on repairs

Well - During the flood, it got contaminated. We shocked it once, but it didn't do the job. We need to shock it again, but it got too cold to perform the process correctly. Will need to do it again when spring rolls around

Then there was the outside damage. Our yard got pretty mangled. To repair the stream, where the flood waters came from, cost $200 for an hour's worth of excavator usage (our neighbor had one, so he gave us a deal), plus an additional $100 for other guy to come over with a backhoe to scrap approximately ten tons worth of streambed gravel and rocks out of our yard. There's still a significant amount of gravel in the yard. More importantly, there's a lot of gravel, muck, silt, and other debris in the stream that runs behind our house. While it's not going to cause a flood like previously, there's a higher chance of the banks overflowing. Also, all the large rocks that made up the walls of the stream, and a large cement pylon that holds up the corner of our garage, got shifted. While the garage is fine for now, there are several sections of the streambed wall that's starting to collapse.

So next summer, I'm going to need to rent an excavator myself to see if I can perform repairs on the streambed. Not sure if I trust myself to try and repair the pylon for the garage though. Only time will tell.

So yeah, that disaster took a lot of time and both mental and physical energy that I used for my writing time. I had to make a choice. Do I blog, or do I focus on working on writing my books? I chose the latter. Currently, I'm nearly finished with the first set of revisions on the first book in my Nibiru Rising series. I also managed to write the first draft of book three in the series as well.

So since the flood, I've written the first draft of two books. I'm hoping to have the revisions done for book one by the end of next week when I'll submit it to either beta readers if I can find them, or the editor. While that's being done, I'm going to start on the revisions for book two, along with starting the process of getting the cover done for book one, possibly book two as well.

Hopefully, everything will come together and I'll be able to release book one sometime in March, possibly in the middle of the month, but more likely the end of the month. The plan is, release book one in March, book two in April, and book three in May. Once that's done and I can see how popular it, I'll determine if I continue writing in that series, or whether I take a break and work on the Fractured Realms series, or possibly start on a third series I've done an outline for.

But that's a few months away before I need to seriously consider which route to go. I'd like to think the Nibiru Rising series does well and I can keep writing more books for it. I have at least three more books worth of ideas ready to go, so it wouldn't be for lack of ideas that I'd take a break from it. The popularity of the series will make the decision for me.

Now that things have started settling down, maybe I can get back to blogging a tad bit more frequently. We'll find out soon enough.

2 Comments

The Nibiru Rising Series is fantastic. I have read book 1 & have started on book2.In addition, your writing style impressed me so much that I also ordered “Syphon” because not only do I love the way your story characters & world seem real but your chapters blend smoothly. However my main complaint is that the majority of writers want you to give a review for Amazon utilizing Facebook. I do not & will not ever do Facebook!

Thank you for the kind words. I've sadly let this blog languish for far too long, honestly. I was focused on way too many other things and in August, had health issues that required me to take it easy until the end of the year (heart surgery and an upcoming operation to remove a touch of thyroid cancer).

Hopefully, moving forward, I'll remember this blog is actually here and start updating to it on a more frequent basis. You also made me realize that not all of my friends are FB users, so I need to keep this in mind as well. I need to work harder at keeping my readers in the loop using my blog rather than social media I don't fully control. All it would take is one person not liking my story to knock me off of one of those platforms. So thank you for reminding me of that fact.

With that said, keep in touch. I love to hear from my fans.

P.S. I'm getting ready to release book three to the Nibiru Rising series very soon. I had hoped to drop it in February, but my editor is booked up until the middle of February, so it would be pretty tight timing to get it out by then. I'm also getting ready to go back through books one and two to clean them up some. I released them originally after only self-editing them. Since then, I've been able to afford to have a professional editor go through them, so I'm going to go back and clean them up before I get softcover editions created. Again, thank you for reading my books and have a great day. 🙂